Berman, Eli

Eli Berman is an associate professor of economics at UC San Diego, research director for international security studies at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include economic development and conflict, the economics of religion, and labor economics. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Homeland Security and the Defense Department have enabled him to study religion, fertility, governance, and insurgency. His latest publications are “Religion, Terrorism, and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model,” with David Laitin, in the Journal of Public Economics (2008), and “The Economics of Religion,” with Laurence Iannaccone, in the New Palgrave Encyclopedia of Economics. Berman received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He twitters a real time annotated bibliography at “clubmodel.”

On Rorotoko:

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016